Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 6: Data Analytics for Complex Systems (joint session DY/SOE)
SOE 6.9: Talk
Monday, September 5, 2022, 17:15–17:30, H18
The impact of the UEFA European Football Championship on the spread of COVID-19 — •Jonas Dehning1, Sebastian B. Mohr1, Sebastian Contreras1, Philipp Dönges1, Emil Iftekhar1, Oliver Schulz2, Philip Bechtle3, and Viola Priesemann1,4 — 1MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37077 Göttingen — 2MPI for Physics, 80805 München — 3Physikalisches Institut, University of Bonn — 4Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Göttingen
Large-scale international events like the UEFA Euro 2020 football championship offer a unique opportunity to quantify the impact of match-related social gatherings on COVID-19, as the number of matches played by participating countries resembles a randomized trial. Moreover, soccer-related activities have a marked gender-imbalance that we can exploit for inference. In our work, we build a differentiable Bayesian SEIR-like model. Its parameters are inferred with Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo using the PyMC3 package. Our model simulates COVID-19 spread in each country using a discrete renewal process and gender-resolved case numbers. On average, 3.2% (95% CI: [1.3%, 5.2%]) of new cases in the 12 analyzed countries can be associated with the match-related social gatherings throughout our analysis period. Individually, England, the Czech Republic and Scotland showed a significant effect. Besides these insights on the spread of COVID-19 during large-scale events, our approach is an example of how modern Bayesian tools can be leveraged to gain insights on a complex dynamic process.